


Skin Deep

by Merit



Category: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-10 01:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16460660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/pseuds/Merit
Summary: Kopil had been a boy once.





	Skin Deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



Battles had wages for weeks, months at the peak of the God Wars. Lightning struck faster than the human eye could comprehend. But Kopil had surpassed humanity. Kopil raised his thin fingers, bones straining against his skin, the stars luminescent above as a god or dozen screamed a death that reverberated through the souls of their followers. Blood ran through the sky, his robe stained scarlet when they called him, the King in Red  —

He smiled.

When he raised his hand, they quailed, sinking to their knees. The gods shrieked, dying, attempting reincarnation, life crushed between his fingers. Then a silence that lasted, seeping into the cracks and corners of people, the edges of their vision.

He rebuilt Dresediel Lex on their bones, rivers of blood turning liquid gold.

 

The skin on Kopil’s hands stretched thin, age spots darkening and screaming like the ghouls he kept hidden deep in the pyramids that had loomed so terribly in his childhood. Wrinkles crackled through skin, like vast chasms in the deserts that stretched for hundreds of leagues outside of Dresediel Lex. Skin and muscle, blood and bone, it clung to him like a too small coat.

Every evening he spent under the stars, the craft sinking deeper into his bones. Every evening he retreated to his desk, the ancient altar, shoulders sinking wearily with age. He slumped into his chair, the sun stretching slowly over the vast corners of his domain, the wilds of the deserts stomped out with every passing year. Dresediel Lex stretched and groaned with growing pains, curled up around wounds that would not heal.

_ He  _ smiled back in the picture frame. Forever young and beautiful, captured imperfectly in a moment that was difficult to imagine.

After Belladonna Albrecht made the Crack in the World, after he slayed Seril Undying, after so many changes to the world.

His skin felt old on him.

 

In the harsh early morning light of Dresediel Lex, the boy playing the dust, laughing and smiling as his mother watched on carefully, could almost seem normal.

But Caleb Altemoc was a throwback. Hidden under long sleeves and high necklines, the blood priest Temoc Almotil, had carved lines of worship into his young flesh. Temoc Almotil laughed, no doubt, then vanished into the shadows and corners of Dresediel Lex. Hidden by people who sank to their knees, shirts torn, heart pumping under delicate skin.

An abomination. 

Caleb Altemoc laughed young and carefree.

 

Kopil didn’t interview everyone.

He didn’t like interviewing anyone. He had hired hordes of HR monkeys, including some actual monkeys, to deal with that nonsense. 

Kopil made the idle suggestion; an interesting graduate from one of the Hidden Schools, a pirate captain with impeccable luck; he didn’t hire people.

He didn’t personally interview a junior risk analyst.

 

Caleb Altemoc stood, charming smile on his face, his hair slicked back unsuccessfully. When he stretched out his fingers, Kopil could see the dice calluses leftover, could feel the skin under his bones. He squeezed, flesh firm and young, and Caleb didn’t wince.

A  _ gambler _ , he thought. 

He could work with this.

He could work with Almotil’s boy.

 

He hired Caleb Altemoc that day.


End file.
